Digital Transformation And Value Stream Management–A CIO’s Guide To 2021

Originally published by New Context.
 

The pandemic has settled the argument over the value of Digital Transformation–and the skeptics are in retreat. The path forward is clear, to get greater visibility, drive value, and de-risk those Digital Transformation efforts. Methodologies such as Value Stream Mapping give executives the tools they need to win. For CIOs, the prime mover in 2021 is delivering business value by finding ways to bring in timelines, increase revenue and maximize profitability while reducing costs for their CEO’s, CFO’s, Boards, and stakeholders.

Often, business value is driven by delivering invaluable customer experiences against critical timelines. To deliver these experiences, CIOs have to cope with the complexity and scale of cloud-native and on-premise application deployments and the multi-cloud networks needed to make them work. CIO’s are therefore looking to invest in platforms which can increase visibility across their distributed teams and enhance their control over their highest value enterprise digital transformation projects. Increasingly, Boards also expect visibility into how quickly critical customer digital experiences are unlocked and increased monitoring of business impact, risk, and resilience.

The challenge we have witnessed at Copado over the past 24 months is a conspicuous gap between the ability of DevOps teams to fast track application development while critical on-premise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Commerce platforms are migrated to the cloud. IT and software development organizations are expected to satisfy increasing demands for access internally and externally by critical stakeholders, such as Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), Chief Data/Digital Officers (CDOs), ecosystem partners, and developers using API platforms, while meeting the stringent requirements for security set by Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs).

We believe 2021 is the year when the best DevOps processes will be integrated with the state-of-the-art Value Stream Management methodologies.

Moreover, the complexity of business processes, siloed assets, and multiple systems of record pose a significant challenge to enterprises that want to accelerate growth and optimize the use of their most valuable resources. This is why we believe 2021 is the year when the best DevOps processes will be integrated with the state-of-the-art Value Stream Management methodologies. From what we’ve seen at New Context, this results in digital transformation project costs and time-to-market being significantly reduced, sometimes by 40-50%. These results are achieved quickly and with confidence when organizations embrace an iterative approach to optimizing the value stream.

In parallel, the return on investment is being impacted because of improved visibility into how the operational investments that have the greatest payoffs are performing. This enhances a CIO’s ability to dial-up and dial-down risk while measuring operational trade-offs versus over-provisioning on-premise and cloud platform resources. This is the control CIO’s have been asking for–not only for themselves and their teams but across their enterprise and digital experience partners.

CIOs have been able to dramatically increase the productivity of their teams and the quality of their deliverables

Over 2018 through 2020, we’ve helped customers differentiate from their competitors and accelerate their time to value by ring-fencing their critical digital assets, mapping their business value stream, and adopting DevOps automation that securely aligns to customer outcomes. When coupled with visualizations that provide visibility into the efficiency and resilience of the value stream, CIOs have been able to dramatically increase the productivity of their teams and the quality of their deliverables.

CIOs have also been able to improve profitability and decrease their costs by dynamically identifying hot spots of inefficiency in the value stream and driving continuous improvement. With the increased migration of CRM, ERP and Commerce platform data to the cloud, we are seeing increased demand for multi-cloud DevOps automation to drive productivity, security, and quality.

One of our founding principles is keeping the connected world safe and productive through observability and transparency. We have seen enterprises work hard to manage the ever-increasing complexity of their cloud-native, multi-cloud, and on-premise portfolio of digital assets. We’ve learned that leveraging best practices in Agile, Security, Software Development Life Cycles, and Automation of cloud-native applications and data platforms are table stakes. Differentiation comes from being able to map the value stream of business outcomes and implementing DevOps that provides the automation and transparency to shorten timelines and increase revenue and profitability. Only then does the path to innovation become part of an enterprise’s DNA.